Revolution Foods – Healthy school lunch is not impossible!

A few months ago we were contacted by the team at Revolution Foods. If you haven’t heard of this company, it’s an amazing start-up founded in 2006 by two ambitious Berkeley MBAs who had a vision for school lunches that don’t suck yet still cost the same as the current offering to kids in free/reduced price lunch programs. The idea was to prepare fresh meals, every day, in a central hub and then ship them by trucks to all the schools in a certain radius.

They started in Oakland, California and expanded from there. Today, Revolution Foods serves healthy meals to students in 6 major markets – 120,000 meals every day! Since its founding, the company has served 30 million freshly prepared meals.

But it doesn’t stop there. The team’s goal is to ignite a healthy food revolution by not only providing access to the highest quality meals, but also by engaging directly with students to empower them to make healthier eating decisions for themselves. Each school is assigned a Revolution employee (School Account Manager, or SAM for short) with a nutrition background. Aside from overseeing the lunch program, SAM teaches nutrition classes.

And a few weeks ago, instead of a routine lesson with a whiteboard, the bay area SAM did something really useful – she taught the kids how to read nutrition labels and ingredient lists. And in order to make it fun, she brought in some iPads with the Fooducate app on them. The children had to read product labels on everyday items and try to analyze and decide how healthy they are. After they came to a conclusion, they would scan the products with Fooducate and see if they were correct.

Needless to say, the kids were ecstatic about using a cool gadget like the iPad. Hopefully they learned a thing or two about nutrition.

So here are two ideas for parents and school administrators:

1. If your school is participating in lunch programs, get in touch with Revolution Foods asap!

2. Get kids excited about nutrition by using some technology in the class. Bring in some supermarket products, teach the children how to read their labels, and then have some fun by scanning the barcodes with Fooducate (Android, iPhone, iPod, and iPad).

Original post: http://blog.fooducate.com/2011/11/11/revolution-foods-healthy-school-lunch-is-not-impossible/